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Willie
Perdomo - Speaking and Writing the Word
By Carla
D. Robinson
Nobody
ever said life in El Barrio was easy. But shame on anybody who
doesn't believe it can be beautiful too. In Where a Nickel Costs a
Dime, Willie Perdomo's first collection of poems, he brings home
the rapture of life in Spanish Harlem, creating a picture that is
as lush in its dark beauty as it is stunning in its poignancy.
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© 2002 RLP Ventures, LLC
Willie Perdomo
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Perdomo came up through the Nuyorican Poets
Café, where he earned
his wings as a Grand Slam Champ. Perdomo credits the Nuyorican
with both informing and changing his life. "It gave me a
reference," the 34 year-old poet recalled. "A body of
New York Puerto Rican literature, poetry, theater, and as it
transformed into an international camp for poets, I started to
develop my voice there."
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It's a voice that Perdomo uses to
juxtapose the story of El Barrio with the larger world that both
limits and necessitates it. He is not a poet who can't envision
himself outside of the place where he grew up, nor is he without
an understanding of the ways in which that place travels with him.
It is his ability to make us yearn for El Barrio, for Harlem,
where some of us may have never been, that casts him as a poet
with heart.
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And for those of us who may have
known the pleasure and pain of walking down 125th Street on a busy
afternoon, Perdomo helps us to see what we likely missed. In his
ode to One-Two-Five, "Let Me Ask You Somethin'," what
materializes most clearly is the entanglement of cultures. From
Perdomo's descriptions of "A moreno and his hermano"
fighting, someone asking "Wanna make a donation to the
nation, brother?" and "Senegalese masks hanging off
parking lot gates," a seldom-depicted cultural understanding
emerges.
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Perdomo acknowledged such artists as
Langston Hughes, Ntozake Shange, Rilke, Piri Thomas, Hector Lavoe,
Willie Colon, John Cheever, and Miguel Pinero as having helped him
gather enough colors to paint the world for the rest of us. Of
Pinero, Perdomo said, "I think his poem 'The Book of Genesis
According to Saint Miguelito' is one of the greatest allegorical
poems ever written. His use of language and his aesthetic of
spitting the street back on the street or stripping the skin off
something that is already raw definitely informs my writing."
In his own work, Perdomo often finds that the English palette is
not big enough to fully illustrate his experiences. "I've
heard poems in Italian and Spanish and I can say that English is
limiting. That's why I try to hijack language off the street. I
use verbatim discussions. I add Spanglish and hip-hop
speak."
Perdomo recently finished his second collection
of poems, titled Smoking Lovely. He has also written Visiting
Langston, a new children's book in verse about a little girl poet
who visits Hughes' home with her father. Currently, Perdomo is
working on a young adult novel set in East Harlem and awaiting the
birth of a baby boy. M
May 2002
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RLP Ventures, LLC and/or its
suppliers. All rights reserved.